


the only snapshots we can take are always out of focus

by middlemarch



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Closet Sex, F/M, Fix-It, Heartbreak, Romance, Runaway Bride, Season 3, Sexual Content, daisies, references to Petrarch, references to Proust
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:47:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23271955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: There was no pro/con list to make about Max Medina.
Relationships: Lorelai Gilmore/Max Medina
Comments: 8
Kudos: 15





	the only snapshots we can take are always out of focus

“You want to talk, Lorelai? Fine, we’ll talk. But not here,” Max said, beckoning her to follow him through a door at the back of the classroom. He was an English teacher, so the odds of it being a secret lair or super-creepy science lab where he’d put an end to her while preserving her pinky finger in a jar of pink tinged alcohol were slight. Not zero, but really, in her favor. She walked behind him, probably a half-step closer than he wanted her to be, or maybe a half-step too far, based on that look he’d given her after their first-post-jilting kiss and the one he’d given her just now when she’d stepped in after knocking-and-not-waiting-for-an-invitation. She walked close enough to smell he was wearing the same old cologne, a little spicy, a little more than she thought Chilton would put up with except he was the English teacher who guest-taught at Stanford and maybe Headmaster Charleston expected that a guy with hair like Max’s, eyes like Max’s, would smell a little spicy and it would be okay as long as he still wore a tie and a vest and a tweed jacket, way too many clothes for a place that actually had central heating and wasn’t an English country house with a name like Albemarle or Cliffenden Abbey. Ahem.

She’d followed him in to what was basically a supply closet with an attitude. So, shelves filled with paperback copies of _Lear_ and _Othello_ and reams of paper but it wasn’t too tight for two people. Three would be pushing it. There was a skinny slash of a window they could have used for firing crossbows at Viking invaders; it let in some weak mixture of the waxing moon’s glow and the flicker of a safety light from the parking lot. There was enough space for them to stake out their corners like boxers, their arms crossed. There was enough space to glare, eyes narrowed. Max didn’t glare.

He also didn’t make use of the space. The moment the windowless door closed behind them, he crowded her against a wall that fortunately didn’t have evenly spaced shelves ready to attack her spinal column. He had her there, her arms hanging useless at her sides like old galoshes or potholders or any of Kirk’s extremities, and she smelled Max underneath the spicy, nutmeggy-and-mace-the-spice-and-not-the-weapon cologne; she took a deep breath and remembered him in his bed and hers and both their cars. On her front porch right before it rained. He waited half a second or maybe less and then he spoke, curt,

“Yes?”

“Yes,” she answered, not entirely sure what she was agreeing to but jumping in with both feet except for staying entirely still like a fawn. A doe. Something with big eyes you didn’t want to kill.

He didn’t want to kill her. Not directly, anyway. He leaned in, a hand, decidedly not like an old rubber galosh or quilted potholder, at her waist, and he kissed her. For real. No jokes. She’d never had such a serious kiss from Max before and that was a pity, because as good a kisser as she’d known him to be, it had instantaneously become clear he was hiding his light under a bushel. His lips were soft and he was deliberate, thorough, confident, demanding; he knew exactly what he was doing and she was a fucking moron, who’d be panting, except that that his tongue was still stroking the inside of her cheeks, her tongue, and his hand at her waist was a fucking anchor to reality except that she really wanted him to wiggle it under her untucked shirttail and discover her delicate, lacy bra and the non-lacy breast it held. He kissed her like she was an antidote, like she was water in the desert, the Holy Grail if you were a Knight Templar, like she was air and destiny and everything. Like they’d done the polite public kiss in front of Miss Patty and Babette and her parents and Rory and now they’d found somewhere private and he could kiss her like he wanted to. Like she was his wife. Beloved. The hand at her waist moved south instead of north and she dimly admired the choice and then gasped, very softly and without any filter.

“ _Fuck, Max…_ ”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too,” he muttered against her parted lips, stepping closer so that his hips were pressed tight against hers, leaving nothing to the imagination except maybe she’d overestimated her imagination and underestimated his. Like maybe she’d drastically underestimated him in a lot of ways. Her hands were suddenly, miraculously not like anything but her own deft hands and she used them to free his shirt and feel his bare skin, hot against her palms, the tickle of his chest hair where it trailed down his stomach. His mouth moved to her throat, just below her ear and his hands to the button of her pants.

“This would be a lot easier if you’d worn the A-line skirt that goes with the boots,” he said, nipping her earlobe.

“What?” She sounded drunk, stupid, dazed. Those words were actually generous.

“Instead of these pants, with the boots,” he said. He was still maneuvering around with a pretty high degree to agility though she wasn’t going to have much once he’d done what he could; they were tight pants, designed to show off her ass, and they were going to be tighter tugged down around her thighs but beggars couldn’t be choosers and it did seem obvious he was going to make her beg. Well, that he’d prefer it.

“Please,” she said, not seeing any point in keeping anyone waiting. It wasn’t like she needed more time to be ready for him. He had to be able to feel it.

“Yeah? You’re okay?” he asked, not moving, which was torture. She shimmied a little since he was like a fucking statue and every nerve ending in her body was nearly vibrating. “I’m clean but—”

“On the pill,” she interrupted and then she shut up because he moved just right and then he was just there. And then he managed to pull her leg forward, maybe a half-inch, and then he was Just. There. There. Oh, fuck-- there.

“Do you know how hard it was to be polite to you before?” he said, evidently not as swept away as she was because he could still form complex questions and she was not sure she could pull off any sound that wasn’t a grunt or a moan.

“Um, yes?” she said. She arched her back and caught his bottom lip in hers.

“Shit, Lora—” he said and she knew he still loved her, because it sounded the same, the nickname only he’d ever used for her and reminded her of the time he’d explained about Petrarch and Laura, her head on his bare chest, both of them pleasantly post-coitally worn out, his reading glasses perched on the top of the stack of books on his side of the bed. 

“Max, I’m sorry, so sorry,” she said, stroking her hands up his straining back.

“You fucking broke my heart, Lorelai,” he said. “You broke my fucking heart and you didn’t call. Who does that? Who?” he pressed, looking at her so intently she wanted to close her eyes or kiss him.

“I made a mistake,” she said.

“Did you?” he asked. “Or did you just act like a sixteen year old?”

“I don’t know, I just had to leave,” she answered, tightening her hold on him, feeling his skin damp with sweat, his breath soft against her cheek.

“You said you wanted to talk but you don’t, do you, Lora? You wanted this, something like this,” he whispered, his thrusts rougher, his hands firm on her hips. “You thought I’d take you on my desk, you wouldn’t have to see my face, but I’d risk everything again.”

“No, Max, I didn’t…” But he was right, even if she hadn’t planned it out, he was right about her, what she’d fantasized about since that kiss in his classroom, the first one, the last one, and how she’d ignored what came in between; the yellow daisies and the coffee and Proust, the morning she hadn’t seen his face when someone else had told him she was gone.

“This isn’t hate sex. I’m not fucking you to get over you,” he said. She was too close to say anything. She kissed the underside of his jaw, a sloppy, hungry kiss because she wanted him and she loved him and she had fucked it all up. “Come on, Lorelai, c’mon, c’mon baby…”

She moved as much as her goddamn tight pants let her and then his mouth was on hers and she was gone, everything soft and hot and broken, and Max’s hands pulled her even closer. She felt him very hard and then suddenly still before he trembled very slightly and they both leaned against the kindly, shelf-less wall.

“I cried every night for two weeks after you left. Did you cry at all?” he said into her hair. The wall had no shelves, but unlike a bed, it had no pillows or sheets to burrow into and the boxy supply closet had nowhere else to look, no etching of a sailboat, no vintage carriage clock on a bedside table. “When you weren’t calling me, did you shed one fucking tear?”

“Yes,” she said. She didn’t say she woken crying, that she hadn’t been able to do it awake, not even in the shower where Rory wouldn’t have heard her, where the steam would have dealt with her face going red and blotchy.

“I still love you,” he said. “I’m still in love with you. Stanford was just far away, it didn’t change anything.”

“Maybe you should have tried Harvard,” she said. “It’s supposed to be the best.”

Somehow, he laughed then, a real laugh and then kissed her throat, a real kiss, soft and tender.

“I don’t trust you, Lora,” he said with such love in his voice, the same tone he would have used to promise to cherish her, the same tone he would have used if something terrible had happened and she’d turned to him for whatever comfort he could give her. 

“And that can’t change?” she asked. He’d already given her a roomful of yellow daisies and _Soleasi nel mio cor star bella e viva_ but she couldn’t help herself.

“Christ, I don’t see how. You’d have to grow up first anyway,” he said.

“Grow up?”

“You had Rory when you were sixteen. You thought that made you an adult, but it didn’t. It made you her mother,” Max said, touching her lightly, her waist, the underside of her breast, the edge of her clavicle. “I didn’t want to marry Rory’s mother. I didn’t want Rory’s mother—I wanted Lorelai but you don’t even know who she really is. So you hurt me, hurt us.”

“And you can’t forgive me?”

“I could try. It might not work,” he said. “I couldn’t forget, Lora.”

“Oh,” she said and then she started crying.

“Yeah, that’s where I ended up too,” he said. He stepped back, fumbled with arranging himself into some version of what he’d looked like when he’d stalked in, though his cheeks were flushed and his hair, even as he tried to smooth it back, was still tousled. There was no cologne left on him, just the familiar musk of their sex. It was a good thing the school was mostly empty.

“I’m leaving now. Take a few minutes and I won’t run into you in the parking lot,” he said.

“I do love you, Max,” she said.

“I know you do. I wish it were enough,” he said, walking out and letting the door close behind him. She waited five minutes, counting the spines of the books, let Jennifer Chadwick become the Booster Club treasurer and drove home to Stars Hollow wondering when she’d turn seventeen.

**Author's Note:**

> I was quite angry about the Lorelai-ditching-Max storyline but what was worse was how they brought him back, toyed with him, and then had that farcical scene dodging desks in his classroom. I have rewritten the scene to my own specifications, which allow them to actually talk about what happened and for Lorelai to get called out on some of her crap.
> 
> Title from Proust.


End file.
